


No Rest for the Wicked

by maythecentrehold



Series: Power and Control [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 19:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3948988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maythecentrehold/pseuds/maythecentrehold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you have no power and no control, there's really no rest for the wicked. Written February 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Rest for the Wicked

**Author's Note:**

> I'm baaaaaack.

Even through her soul-aching grief, Danny knows that the story they tell her family is darkly hilarious. Typical of administration, it is a stock, multiple-choice message, bland words on Silas letterhead. The final option is circled (D: _other)_ and there are a few short sentences inked on the blank lines below. They tell an emotionless tale of a disappearance, her last known location (on the fringes of the hellforest behind the Lustig), that there was no body found, could the student’s possessions please be collected within two weeks lest they be destroyed, no further correspondence will be required.

Danny barks out a laugh at that. There had been no corpse to be discovered, and Danny Lawrence as she had once been was gone, never to be found.

She watches as they mourn. Her Summer sisters, her parents, her huge, close-knit family. She watches as they age, slowly at first, the years gradually tumbling past faster than she can grasp at them. Her breath sweeps slowly in and out of dead lungs as milestones come and go.

The day she should have graduated, her sisters stand vigil for a slow, aching minute in her honour, and it takes all she has to not leap from her place in the shadows and scream that she is _right there._ The subtle threat in Mircalla’s hand looped through the crook of her elbow is all it takes to stop her.

The curtains fall on the day, and from then she watches from adjacent street corners and their very own shadows as jobs and promotions and lovers and weddings and children happen, as lines trace faces and grey hair laces through once vibrant colours as the years trickle past like blood from an open wound.

The tall, auburn, Danny-shaped holes in each of their hearts never truly heal, and she finds solace in that; she wears her own waxy scar like a brooch of flesh on her breast, a stark reminder that death itself marked her as one of it’s own and she will never truly be healed.

Death (and subsequent reanimation into unlife) changes a person.

In the first decade or so, Danny fights. She struggles against the bonds of immortality and the world changing around her static form. When that fails, she hides, but she finds to her horror that she cannot bring herself to part completely from her own personal hell. Carmilla is strong and Danny is young _(Little one, little one_ breathed against the air like a prayer) and Carmilla's blood in Danny's veins ties them.

Lilita is _Maman_ (for the show must go on) and Will is _brother_ but Carmilla is _Mother._ Her blood binds them all; they walk the earth because she made it so. Blood is family is duty _(is love),_ and love will have its sacrifices.

Danny loses her faith. It falls away like water through open fingers on the same day she is reborn, forced from her along with her soul with the spine-tingling scream that accompanies her second birth. If Artemis, the huntress, the protector of her youth really existed, she would have taken an arrow through Danny's heart as she lay beneath Carmilla on that cold slab of stone. Her dedication would have surely earned her at least that small mercy from her goddess.

The golden arrow never found it's home, and Danny's chance at an afterlife faded away with it's golden gleam over the horizon. She remembers the heat of it, that golden glow, but nothing warms her any more.

Some days she wakes screaming because LaF is choking on a hand around their throat and Laura is drowning in thick red blood and the sickening crack of Perry's neck is a gunshot through her grey matter. The dreams are a constant, but the years pass and Silas slowly forgets poor Danny Lawrence. They return, then, Mircalla Karnstein and Diana Lewis one year, Callamir Karnstein and Mara Archer the next, and each time the pseudonyms sit ungainly over her form like an oversized coat, chafing and itching at her skin until she wants to scream from it.

The denizens of Silas’ halls may have forgotten her, but the details of the place are seared deep into her brain, vampiric senses constantly relaying tiny new addendums until she knows it like she once knew her own heartbeat (it was steady, once, and she can almost feel the echo of its beat against her too-still ribs).

Some days as she walks quickly past the old theatre building or glances absently to the steps of the library, she catches a glimpse of a ghost. For a moment so short her terrifyingly sharp senses almost miss it, Laura is running down the stairs, head tossed back in a victory crow as she clutches a book to her chest, or Laf is towing a reluctant Perry towards the back of the building holding some scientific array explaining about “the weird” like it’s a corporeal entity and demanding that samples be taken.

The moments always pass quickly, but she cherishes them all the same.

She can’t remember what Laura’s laugh sounded like. That hurts more than the phantom ache of iron needles in her chest or the feeling of being drained alive ever could.


End file.
